Friday, February 06, 2004

As I sit here at home after a great couple hours of poker, I feel somewhat melancholy over the fact that I am dedicating over 30 hours or more a week to a job that is leading nowhere.
Sucks, don't it?
I received a call earlier tonight asking me to cover a midshift on saturday.
Well, with my current schedule in mind, saturday is realistically my only full day off, ever, at all.
gone.
And since only FIVE (theoretically six, but one is not considered a person by the rest of the guys) people are employed at the retail outlet I work at, there really is no choice but for me to accept the extra shift and feel like I am in a prison for gay men that weigh over 300 pounds.

Thursday, February 05, 2004

As I eat a snickers here in class, I find myself coming to conclusions about certain aspects of life. Where sometimes I have come to these same conclusions, time after time I feel it comes to me in greater clarity and detail.

Interpersonal relationships are everything in today's society.

From school, work, relatives, projects, gaming, to everything under the sun, all of it uses relationships with others.
Sometimes you lose sight of how important these relationships are, and it affects them in a severe way. The way I came about this was with my focus being on managing my current schedule, as it seems to be very stressful and work intensive.
An average day begins with me waking up from a poor nights sleep at about 6:30, and getting ready for school. My first class at school is a mind intensive math class, jumpstarting my day early. Second class is Sociology, where we have a teacher that loves to discuss the different aspects of culture, society, and other parts of the world in which we live- all well and good, but we are rehashing ideas that I think about daily, but to a lesser extent. Third period is my music class, where I am the only senior drummer, so excellence is expected of me, even when I can not make time in my schedule to practice and focus more upon music. From there I get a short lunch break and head off to OSC, or occupational skills center, where my role is somewhat convoluted, in that I am part teacher and part student. The first quarter, even semester, was dedicated to me teaching several students about Microsoft Windows 2000, competently enough to get certified, even. As time goes on, the teacher of the class that I worked under started to hand out assignments to me and my students as they passed their windows 2000 tests, making my life a lot harder as I try and concentrate on other personal goals for the class- such as passing the next test in the MCSA course, or working on material I need in the upcoming rush for a better job. Stress runs pretty high because of our opposing goals in the class. After this, four or five days out of the week I go change and head off to work, a local games retailer. There I deal with angry customers and gum on the floor until about 10:30 at night, when the store is closed and I can go home. From there, I take about half an hour, my only personal time in the day, to check up on websites I might be interested in or other things. sometimes this stretches into an hour or two, and I get to bed around midnight or so. And the process repeats.

But as this happens, in every aspect of the day, there are people I talk to and communicate with at every level- my peers, such as coworkers, other MCPs at OSC, classmates, and friends, my superiors, such as bosses, teachers, directors, etc, and people that look up to me, such as the people I teach at OSC or the kids in band that ask me for advice.

So the point I'm getting to, is that the stress levels affect me greatly, and I let that stress bleed off into my daily conversations and life. Well, since your interpersonal relationships are everything, this greatly affects you. And, well, after a certain point I take things either too seriously or too emotionally. Sometimes you haveto just step back from the entire situation, and take a look at it.

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

When the assignment came up to make your own blog, I had plans to use an asp.net blog, but the material and knowledge needed for the kind of project I was thinking of was somewhat out of reach. The templates provided weren’t very powerful, and they felt kind of chunky, as far as how it worked. I looked around on the net for some other templates and came across an ASP and HTML combination site, blogger.com. As I was going through it, I noticed that you could use your own FTP server to upload your blog to- and I got an idea of how I could make an auto-updating blog that is hosted off of my own DNS name.
I already had the DNS name registered and port forwarded to an IIS server at my house, so I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to set up an FTP server and forward port 21. The issue is, blogger.com allows you to specify an FTP server to upload the blog in its entirety to that FTP server. Well, the issue with that is, it doesn’t publish it anywhere, it just uploads it.
The next step I needed to take would be to configure IIS for this to work. I reinstalled IIS with the FTP protocols, and set it up for authenticated logons only. I then gave the blogger site the login information and port forwarded the FTP ports on my router. So it uploaded the .asp and .html files to the ftp, but the home directory on the FTP server defaults to an IIS folder- specifically, C:/Inetpub/ftproot on the host machine. Well I wanted it to automatically publish to an HTTP server, which is kind of hard because it uploads on an FTP server. I configured IIS to use the ftproot folder as the home directory in IIS, so everything in the FTProot folder was dumped into the hosting on the DNS site. I set the blogger site to upload it as index.htm so it would automatically default to that when I brought up the name in a web browser. Lastly, I catalogued all of my effort in blogs, and started editing more of the blog content such as links and archives.
I did all of that after work at midnight or so, because that was the only time I had to work on the IIS server and the blogs because of goals mentioned in the blog. I will be posting a copy of this in my blog.

Monday, February 02, 2004

So I think I have my FTP site working here. I reinstalled IIS and set up my music server again, which should be working, and linked to over there >>
Just getting the darn thing to publish onto the server now...
ah, I see the problem. no write acess. okay brb.

This is the first day of my Blog.
Some objectives I have in mind:
Re-evaluate my resume and create a cover letter for several places I plan to apply to, including Microsoft for the High School internship program and Blizzard for the IT position that is available.
I also plan to continue working on my MCSA, by finishing up windows 2000 server. One thing I haveto do, as well as the other MCP students, is reinstall windows 2000 on all of the computers in the MCP lab.
And I work today. Blah.